PART II. SECTION 3: WHAT IS THE WORLD
Lesson 247 Without Forgiveness I Will Still Be Blind
- Sin is the symbol of attack. Behold it anywhere, and I will suffer. For forgiveness is the only means whereby Christ’s vision comes to me. Let me accept what His sight shows me as the simple truth, and I am healed completely. Brother, come and let me look on you. Your loveliness reflects my own. Your sinlessness is mine. You stand forgiven, and I stand with you.
- So would I look on everyone today. My brothers are Your Sons. Your Fatherhood created them and gave them all to me as part of You, and my own Self as well. Today I honor You through them, and thus hope this day to recognize my Self.[1]
Notes and Personal Application: We blind ourselves to the truth of God when we continue to hold condemnation and unforgiveness in our hearts toward others. When we look upon the world and the people, circumstances, and events as sinful, evil, and out to get us, to persecute us, to take away our sunshine, to steal Christmas, to deny us our pleasures and treasures, we are blind. We still do not get what salvation is all about. No matter how much we talk about Jesus, we do not know Him. No matter how many people we drag to church, no matter how much we read our bibles, no matter how much we cry out to God, as long as we fail to see others as ourselves, as long as we are content that we get to go to heaven while others burn in hell, as long as we see God as the unloving father who prepares dungeons of torment for His prodigals, we have missed the point.
In today’s lesson Jesus urges us to see that the idea of “sin” stands for attack. If I can call my coworker sinful and think of myself as holy, I am attacking my coworker. I am not recognizing our oneness. I am seeing myself as separate from him and therefore separate from the Lord.
Years ago I was having such a struggle with a coworker. I kept complaining about her in my prayers. I cited her wrongdoing: the lies she told, the ways in which she cheated, stole, and used people to get what she wanted. Sharing an office, I was privy to the personal phone conversations she took on company time. I sat, dumb and seething, as she turned family members against each other; played favorites; lied to her husband in a soft, crooning voice, cajoled officials, wormed her way in to high places. Our office was full of her secret purchases, boxes and files of bills and letters from creditors crammed our file cabinets, bookcases, and work closet. Day after day I was regaled with the boring, trite ongoing drama of her out-of-control personal life.
And yet everyone seemed to prefer her over me! She was tall and thin and bleached her hair. She was showy, sporting the latest fashions and trends. I despised this woman but every time I went to God in prayer, God told me how much He loved her. He would turn a deaf ear to all of her wrongdoing. He did not want to hear the bad report. His still quiet voice inside would ask me to forgive her, to love her, to learn what she was teaching me.
I have come to realize that we were one – that her problems were my problems; that her mistakes were my mistakes. While I thought of myself as more honest, smarter, and spiritual, I was blind to the truth of our oneness. Her mistakes may have taken a different form than my own, but that did not absolve me from the attack and condemnation that I chose to perceive rather than her loveliness, her purity, her innocence, and goodness. I was so caught up in my jealousy and superiority toward her that I was blinded to her divinity, and therefore to my own. I could have offered her forgiveness, but instead I cherished the thought of her as a narcissist, a sociopath, a raving egomaniac. If she was all that, then I mistakenly thought that I could be something else.
But it does not work that way, Jesus tells us. We suffer as long as we refuse the simple truth of His Vision. Refuse the Vision of Christ for anybody and we deny it to ourselves. We remain trapped in a dark pit along with all we see as different from ourselves. What we see in our outer world is there to teach us lessons in separation and darkness. I learned so much about myself from my coworker. Perhaps her wrongdoings seemed more blatant than my own, but they brought to light my own tendency to be sneaky, to tell fibs, to exaggerate my own worth, to compete and push myself to the forefront, to rely on my charm and winsomeness, to nose in the affairs of others, to get ahead in a game that goes nowhere.
As long as we are engaged in pointing fingers and blaming others for their godlessness, telling their stories of shame, and broadcasting their mistakes, we are causing our own suffering. We are not healed, and we cannot offer salvation and healing to others. We can invite people to our tabernacles and offer them a social “gospel,” a pleasant place to come and make friends with other nice people who try not to tell lies, cheat on their taxes, or covet their neighbor’s ass, but we are not recognizing our true function in Christ. We are not standing with Him. We are not accepting our role in the plan of salvation.
We honor Christ every time we refuse to give place in our minds to sin in any form. We honor Christ each time we deny the power of sin and shame to defeat us, to frighten us, or cause us to cower. We honor Christ when we can look upon the world with forbearance and forgiveness because we recognize it as the farce it is.
Today look on everyone through the eyes of the Father sure of His Sons’ return. He created all of us, we are one with Christ, His beloved and truest, trusted Son. We honor God when we honor one another and hold each other in our minds and hearts, not with our fallen, perverted natures, but our true natures in God. Today we come before God not as the accusers, but as the forgivers. We tell Him of how dear our brothers are to us, how worthy of our affection and love, how grateful we are to them for being part of us, our created being, our story incomplete without them.
Today we honor God through His Creation and it is through His Creation that we come to know our true and everlasting Selves.
[1] A Course in Miracles. Workbook for Students. Lesson 247. Foundation for Inner Peace, Second Edition (1992).
Audio credit: the friar patch @ http://www.eckiefriar.com
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